Trans Girl in Love

By Gwen Benaway

Most Canadians do not think about trans women. Unless you know one of us personally or we share a workplace, I doubt the lives of trans women have ever crossed your mind. There are trans women on television, usually reality TV or talk shows, but we’re rarely shown as ordinary human beings like everyone else. Sometimes I wonder what strangers think or see when they recognize me as trans on the street or in the subway. To be honest, I’m thankful I don’t know what they think. The most painful moments in my life have come from hearing, often unsolicited, what people in my life think of my gender.

If our everyday existence as trans women is uncontemplated by a majority of Canadians, our love lives are completely invisible. This erasure of our romantic and sexual selves is partly by choice. Many trans women, myself included, are reluctant to speak about being a trans girl in love. We’ve learned through media articles and commentary from friends that any discussion of our love lives can end in painful conversations about our desirability, realness as women, or a detailed and unwanted discussion of our genitals.

At the same time, the silence and invisibility surrounding our love lives is dangerous. Eighteen trans women have been murdered this year in North America, usually by their male romantic partners. One case stays in my mind. A seventeen-year-old trans girl was brutally stabbed to death in the front seat of her boyfriend’s car, a year after they started dating. He took her to dinner and then drove her into an empty parking lot before stabbing her in the chest almost thirty-four times. He killed her because his friends found out she was trans. He didn’t want anyone to think he was gay, so he murdered her to erase any doubts of his sexuality.

The lack of conversation or representation of trans women in romantic relationships, particularly with cis gender men, is a major component of the violence experienced by trans women in intimate relationships. Since I transitioned, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with men about my gender, their sexualities, and the complexity of being a trans girl in love. Those conversations range from treating me as a sexual fetish, to asking me if I would keep the relationship secret, to straightforward recognition of me as attractive but off limits because of my status as a trans girl. I usually pass as a cis gender woman in photographs, so even when I disclose my status on online dating applications, I have men talk to me for hours or even days before realizing I’m trans. The violent intensity of their reaction to realizing I’m a trans girl is a reminder of how dangerous it is for me in the world, how easily men can swing from being sweet to life-threatening.

I know mainstream coverage of the dangerous reality of trans girls in love will quickly focus in on our genitals. I’ve had people comment on my poetry or articles about trans girl love with long posts about “genital preferences.” There is the usual comment of “Welcome to being a woman,” a double-ended knife I’ve heard a thousand variations of. I remember the first time I was violently harassed as a trans girl while walking to work. I told my female friend, who brushed it off, saying, “Well, that’s what being a girl is,” ignoring that there is a very different dimension to what I experience with street harassment to what a cis girl does. Another trans woman put it better than I can when she said to me, “Most of the time, I can’t tell if they want to kill me or fuck me or both.”

What I don’t want to do is write a response to those comments because they dehumanize me. They force me to address varying levels of transphobia rooted in nothing more than “common sense” prejudice. They don’t change the conversations because the people who make those conversations don’t want the conversation to change. They, as cis gender people in a system which grants them enormous privilege, want to cling to a vision of the world with clear lines between bodies, sexualities, and gender. Of course, that’s not the world we live in. Human beings are tremendously diverse in practice and experience, but like other forms of discrimination, recognizing that diversity often presents a threat to the people with the most social power.

My interest in writing about trans girl love is a simple one. I would like to present trans girls in our full humanity, to normalize the men who love us and show our intimacy as beautiful. More than sexual deviants or perversions, our love and bodies are a powerful force in the world. We deserve better than paper-thin images of us as hyper-sexualized women or desexualized social justice saints. In the absence of any conversation around our love lives, the burden falls on us as trans girls to have those dialogues, as painful as they often are.

I have been in love as a trans girl. I have had several sexual partners since I transitioned, but only two romantic ones. My appearance, a light skinned blonde petite trans girl with decent sized breasts and slender legs, aligns with what is often considered desirable for women. There are many men who are attracted to trans girls. If I wanted to, I could have a different sexual partner every night. I could not have a different romantic partner every night. Romance with a trans girl is a very different reality than sex with a trans girl and obeys different rules. To fuck us does not require much from the man in question, aside from his arousal. To love us asks much more from a man, a price most men are unwilling to pay.

The price of being in love with a trans girl is multi-faceted. There is the social judgment which a man must face in being seen with us as our romantic partners. I remember going on a second date with a guy that I dated in the summer. Everyone in the bar stared at us, trying to figure out what I was. I pointed it out to him and he told me that he noticed but really didn’t care. Few men would have that response.

One of my favourite memories was when a cis boy in my life slow danced with me in a crowded bar of people to swing music. For one song, we were the only couple on the floor. To be held and loved in public as a trans woman is incredibly powerful, an affirmation of our humanity and worth as women.

There are other prices as well beyond the social stigma. There is the reality of confronting transphobia in society. If you are a man in love with a trans girl, you will have to experience and face transphobia, as well. You will watch it happen to us on a daily basis. You will feel compelled to protect us and may have to defend us from attack. It has happened with my partners, moments where they had to challenge servers who tried to force me into the men’s washroom or tell random men saying slurs to fuck off. It’s not an easy thing to witness prejudice, especially when it happens to someone you love.

There is also the need for negotiation. Conversations about sex, figuring out what works for both partners and how to navigate the unique realities of our bodies, are difficult to have, especially as they often happen when we are just getting to know someone. All of this work represents an added layer to the already complicated business of falling in love, developing romantic attachment, or connecting with another human being. It’s hard enough to be a girl in love, much less a trans girl in love.

The most powerful obstacle to being a trans girl in love is the absence of any narrative about the worth or value of having a trans girl partner. We are seen as less than in the narratives of love in Western culture. There are almost zero representations of trans girls in loving relationships with cis men anywhere. For a cis man to recognize our value as romantic partners, he has to unpack the entire suitcase of heterosexual masculinity and decide to complicate the understandings of desire, love, and sex that have been handed to him over the course of his entire life. Few men are brave or strong enough to undertake this work. How beautiful or desirable does a trans girl have to be in order to be worth this work? How extraordinary does her partner have to be in order to allow for this possibility?

What does it feel like to be a trans girl in love? It feels like watching your lover post pictures of himself with cis women, tagging them and commenting on their photos with hearts. It feels like your lover breaking up with you and swearing that it isn’t because you’re trans but because he isn’t ready for a relationship. It’s the sudden collapse of your world when you realize he’s in a new relationship with a cis girl who looks just like you. It’s a million small pains in your body, growing into an ache that fills your life.

Being a trans girl in love is being ignored by your lover for acknowledging him publicly. It’s being told that you use transphobia as a weapon when you challenge him for saying he doesn’t see you as a woman yet. It’s falling in love with a boy only to realize that he will never see you as a real girl. It’s knowing nothing you do will ever change how he sees you, not even surgery. It’s knowing no matter how pretty or passable you become, you will always be seen as second best. It’s living inside the violence of being a girl without being allowed to talk about it.

People have little sympathy for trans girls in love. The assumption is that we’ve made a choice and have to deal with the social consequences of that decision, including in our romantic lives. Except that being a trans girl in love was never a choice. I was born as a woman inside a body that I did not recognize as my own until hormones sufficiently transformed it to the woman I am now. I never lived as man, regardless of my body or how people perceived me. All of my romantic partners before transitioning were bisexual men who recognized me as female. All of them reached out when I announced my transition to offer support and to say that they had always known this truth about me. My longest ex-partner of five years treated my transition as completely natural, reminding me that he always called me his girlfriend when we were together.

I’m not asking for cis gender sympathy. My goal through my writing has always been to show the complexity and possibility of trans girl love. I want to provide other narratives of our love, ones which don’t end in us being murdered. I would like my own love stories to end differently, not discarded for a cis female partner or relegated to the role of being a secret. I’d like to be able to talk about trans girl love without having to defend my right to exist or the worth of my body. In showing our love, I want to make stories of us which allow for us to be beautiful, desired, and celebrated as we are.

I have no illusions of changing the profound transphobia which fills every part of my romantic interactions. I’ve worked with my partners around these issues and it’s very difficult, if impossible, to challenge their inherent transphobia. I’ve gotten used to the sting of scrolling through Instagram and seeing photos of them with their cis partners, watching privilege and power erase me over and over again.

I’m the other other woman. I don’t foresee a world where that ends in my lifetime.

What I do see is the need for voices and stories like mine. By empowering trans girls in love to speak about their bodies, sexualities, and the intimacy of their bodies, we can create a possibility of us in the world. If cis men are aware of these stories, will they treat us differently? I don’t know, but it isn’t about them. It’s about us as trans women reclaiming ourselves from hatred, prejudice, and shame. It’s liberation of our voices, freedom to speak to our experiences as only we can. I don’t want to live in a world where the only image of trans girls that my lovers have is porn or the movie Tangerine.

So I write, I speak, and I create. Despite the cost and the judgment I get for it, I do the work of talking about trans girls in love. Sometimes I am judged from within community for speaking to this reality. Sometimes I have hard conversations with my lovers about the things I write. Sometimes I am hurt in profoundly complicated ways by the act of speaking or what is said back to me. I come back to the words of the Black feminist poet, Audre Lorde, who wrote, “So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.”

While Lorde is speaking to a specific experience of blackness and racism which I do not want to erase or neglect, I see a possible extension in meaning to include other marginalized peoples, including trans girls. I speak for all of the girls who were murdered for being a trans girl in love. I speak for my own pain of being a trans girl in love. Mostly, I speak because silence is no less hurtful than giving voice. If I am silent, nothing will change. If I speak, nothing may change but there is the small chance of other possibilities.

As a poet, as a woman, as a trans girl in love, it is those possibilities that I chase.

Share the Experience

you came on my stomach,
twice in twenty minutes,
less the second time

I remember your penis
ejaculate in slow motion
as our eyes connect.

I don’t cum anymore-
I borrow your moisture
to make my own wetness.

this way of fucking,
divined by you as solution
to the problem of my body

you, cradle your cock
against my half hard clit
in your right hand

flip me on my back,
fuck our genitals together
while your left arm

pushes me down hard,
grind our bodies as if
you were fucking a cis girl

I scratch your back raw,
instinct, blind and mewing,
pressure where my vagina

will someday be makes me
orgasm in waves of sharp
electricity between bodies.

then your warm semen
pools in the cleft of me,
you hold me with hands

that smell of cock,
a not girl, not boy scent-
we fall asleep, confused

into the soft dark hole
of my body, finding comets
where other girls have cunts.

GwenBenaway is an award winning trans girl poet of Anishinaabe and Métis descent. She has published two collections of poetry, Ceremonies for the Dead and Passage, and her third collection, Holy Wild, is forthcoming from BookThug in 2018.